ASCII

ASCII
ASCII chart from MIL-STD-188-100 (1972)
MIME / IANAus-ascii
Alias(es)ISO-IR-006,[1] ANSI_X3.4-1968, ANSI_X3.4-1986, ISO_646.irv:1991, ISO646-US, us, IBM367, cp367[2]
Language(s)English (made for; does not support all loanwords), Malay, Rotokas, Interlingua, Ido, and X-SAMPA
ClassificationISO/IEC 646 series
Extensions
Preceded byITA 2, FIELDATA
Succeeded byISO/IEC 8859, ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode)

ASCII (/ˈæsk/ ASS-kee),[3]: 6  an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. ASCII has just 128 code points, of which only 95 are printable characters, which severely limit its scope. The set of available punctuation had significant impact on the syntax of computer languages and text markup. ASCII hugely influenced the design of character sets used by modern computers, including Unicode which has over a million code points, but the first 128 of these are the same as ASCII.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the name US-ASCII for this character encoding.[2]

ASCII is one of the IEEE milestones.[4]

  1. ^ ANSI (1975-12-01). ISO-IR-6: ASCII Graphic character set (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.
  2. ^ a b "Character Sets". Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). 2007-05-14. Retrieved 2019-08-25.
  3. ^ Mackenzie, Charles E. (1980). Coded Character Sets, History and Development (PDF). The Systems Programming Series (1 ed.). Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. pp. 6, 66, 211, 215, 217, 220, 223, 228, 236–238, 243–245, 247–253, 423, 425–428, 435–439. ISBN 978-0-201-14460-4. LCCN 77-90165. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 26, 2016. Retrieved August 25, 2019.
  4. ^ "Milestone-Proposal:ASCII MIlestone - IEEE NJ Coast Section". IEEE Milestones Wiki. 2016-03-29. Retrieved 2024-02-26.